Anyway, if they were in Nelsons Navy, they may well be honourable and decent, but wouldn't be Gentlemen!
A strange world indeed, Marcus, and most of us are enjoying your interesting tale. Silsoe, however, starts with a good joke about Marcus's commendable praise for his former USAF officers, SS. and then spoils things by making a bit of of a unsubstantiated and unnecessary generalisation about the naval officers in Nelson's day.
I believe that I know what he may have been thinking of, perhaps along the lines of the quotation from Macaulay's
History of England, namely that "There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen."
However, by Nelson's time the situation had changed substantially, and even a small amount if research would have shown that there were plenty of naval officers who would be honourable and decent - as well as professional and gentlemanly, just like Marcus's flight crew in fact, which I like to think is precisely why he hired them!
Jack